Sun enter offseason with lots of questions

The games have ended, but the work has just begun for the administrative arm of the Connecticut Sun.

Marc Allard

The games have ended, but the work has just begun for the administrative arm of the Connecticut Sun.

The players have packed up and are now headed for their homes for a brief respite before most head to Europe and Asia to play basketball this winter. But that is not the case for coach Anne Donovan and general manager Chris Sienko. They get to stay around for awhile and digest what has just passed and what went so wrong.

What happened to turn a team from an Eastern Conference champion into the team with the worst record in the WNBA?

“It’s going to be good to get a chance to breathe and kind of reflect on everything and spend a lot of time on re-evaluation of the season, individually, and collectively as a group,” Donovan said.

Who will stay and who will go and how can this team change? If there is one thing everyone agrees, it’s that the Sun will have a different look next season.

Change expected

“I do (expect things to change),” veteran guard Renee Montgomery said. “I’m going to be sad about it because we’ve been with this group for a good three years at least. It’s going to be sad to see people go, because you build friendships and bonds with folks.”

Donovan said after the season that the Sun just endured, “the committment to change is strong.”

The changes likely won’t begin immediately.

Unlike last year when the WNBA draft lottery took place in the last week of September — chiefly because ESPN wanted to make it an event to kick off its “three to see” campaign featuring Brittney Griner, Elena Delle Donne and Skylar Diggins — it will now likely be held in November during the league meetings, according to Sienko, although he wasn’t completely sure of that. The league has not announced a specific date for the draft lottery.

The draft lottery determines the order of the draft for the first four teams who did not make the playoffs, is weighted by record and, like the NBA, determined by ping-pong balls popping out of a lottery-draw machine. The Sun will have the most chances to get the first pick, followed by New York and Tulsa and then San Antonio.

The Sun are guaranteed no worse than the No. 4 selection in what is considered to be a deep draft.

“There are some very talented young ladies out there, (Chiney) Ogwumike, Odyssey Sims, (Alyssa) Thomas. There are a lot of them out there,” Sienko said. “We don’t know where we will end up. As history shows, the worst team does not always get the first pick, in fact, rarely does that seem to be the case. I think we have a good group of young ladies here, and if we’re all healthy at the same time, what difference does it make (as to where the Sun end up in the draft.).”

Two picks

The Sun currently have just two picks, in the first and third rounds.

It traded its second-round pick to Tulsa for forward Kayla Pedersen.

Trading is not an easy task in the WNBA. Donovan said that’s because since it is such a small pool, everybody knows everyone’s strengths and flaws. Sienko adds that trading within the conference is also nearly impossible, which cuts the field from 11 possible trading partners to six.

“There are no secrets any more,” Donovan said. “Everyone who is playing overseas, we all know exactly what they are doing. It used to be, back in the day before all this media, you used to lose track of them and you were just looking at stats. Now, you don’t even have to go overseas to find out what they are doing.”

Look to Europe?

Donovan said she does plan to go to Europe this winter, more so to catch up with current Sun players than to look for prospects. The European pool is not attractive to Donovan because of the world championships and Olympic games which tend to keep foreign players locked up in Europe.

“The desire level to be in the (WNBA) has changed, it’s shifted,” Donovan said of the European players. “I don’t think you can count on a (European player). If you draft one or bring one, you had better be prepared with a backup plan. I don’t think you can count on a Lauren Jackson-type career. I don’t think that happens much any more.”

The Sun tried to encourage Sandrine Gruda to return this year, but failed despite a favorable international calendar. The Sun still hold the WNBA rights to Spanish forward Alba Torrens and Donovan said “there’s hope” that she could come over in 2014 since she has never played in the WNBA and may want a new experience.

There’s also the matter of the collective bargaining agreement which is up for renewal between players and management and how those negotiations go. That could delay the free agency process of which the Sun figure prominently in. The Sun have four restricted free agents and four unrestricted free agents. The only players under contract for next season are Kelly Faris and Pedersen (under their rookie contracts) and both Kara Lawson and Renee Montgomery.

“When we won the championship in Seattle, I had a lot of decisions to make, a lot of contracts came due. That was really scary,” Donovan said. “You come off a championship, you want to keep your core together. We don’t have that kind of situation here, we didn’t have that kind of season. I wouldn’t say it’s scary, it’s opportunity.”